Richard Braakman wrote: > Peter S Galbraith wrote: > > > He wants to avoid > > someone taking his work (without compensation), slapping a GUI on > > top on it and selling it as a Windows app or something. The X > > license would allow that. > > But he wants to do exactly that with contributed code? :)
Yup. He wants to keep that door open in case he decide to do that. I guess he doesn't expect an email saying: `There's a cool new way of figuring out contours, here's a patch for it's inclusion into gri'. He expects patches like `on line 3456 of gri.c the foreach loop should go to n-1 instead of n'. > Yes, that > requires an asymmetric license. The ones I know about are the QPL and > the NPL. > > > He was almost ready to use the GPL, but I pointed out that once > > people send in patches his work is no longer his alone. He can't > > turn around, modify the work and sell it without hunting through > > for all patches and re-writing them. > > But you say below that he doesn't expect a significant amount > of patches. Make up your mind ;-) Doesn't make a difference right? The _worst_ case is someone sending in a GPL'ed patch like `on line 3456 of gri.c the foreach loop should go to n-1 instead of n'. How could he re-write that patch? The protection for him is against having to hunt through his own code for snippets that don't belong to him anymore. Once I told RMS I had written something better for feature in Emacs, and he should take a look at it. RMS replied he wouldn't _look_ at the code unless it was GPL'ed. Same idea I guess. > > I don't think that the threat > > of reduced hacker code input is an argument for him since it > > hasn't been a driving factor so far. > > Then why does he want the program to be free? If he doesn't expect > code input, then perhaps because he wants many people to use it -- > people who would not use a non-free program. I think he could get > even more people to use it if he uses something freer than the QPL. He doesn't _expect_ code input. I think he'd be glad if someone contributed huge features. It's easy to give your code away unless you want to hang on to the possibility of selling it under a different license in a parallel fashion. I have written code that I couldn't hope to sell now because of my inclusion of contributions from dozens of people. > > Is the patch clause your major hurdle? Or the fact that he could > > use your 0.1% contribution for profit? > > The patches-only clause. I don't consider such code to be free. > (Notice how carefully I said DFSG-free in my first mail :-) If we could modify the QPL and rename it, we could do that. I will be forwarding this conversation to the upstream author. Peter
